Important elements of being Australian threatened

Since Tony Abbott and his bunch of precocious ministers were elected, Australia, as a nation, has told the world a number of things.

We have said we are against all data, scientific advice and reason, and that global warming has been abolished.

We have also said that science and women do not need a Minister of government and that, against all diplomatic evidence and Indonesian warnings, Indonesia will agree to Mr Abbott's simplistic "turn back the boats" squawking.

The NBN, as we breathe, is being massacred.

There are 16,000 poor people who have benefits and who have had these benefits stripped away to pay for the rich's benefits.

Australia has further said that its people not should benefit from superannuation profits when they occur in the mining sector and that big polluters who poison our atmosphere and acidify our life supporting oceans should pay no price on their carbon crimes.

And, soon after Mr Abbott's hand-picked neo-conservative "reviews" bring down their already known recommendations, we will be subject to a massive attack on the public sector.

We will also see the social wage paralleled by a wave of privatisation designed to loosen government influence over matters of health, hospitals, schooling, universities, power supply and industrial relations.

As Australia's commitment to the common good and community goes down the toilet, flushed away with satisfaction by the neo-conservatives, my feelings of shame return.

I am proud to be Australian but am ashamed to see the most important elements of being Australian diluted and ultimately replaced with "values" of individuality.

Between them, the neo-conservatives and ALP attempts to grab the middle ground have gone well down the track of destroying our public schools and eroding our public hospitals, so much so that we now spend billions every year to ensure Australia divides its young'uns, from age four to 18, along religious and socio-economic divides.

The question of social cohesion is now in the frame.

How can we expect our adult population to show respect, understanding, tolerance and empathy to other groups when their community is divided up from the earliest of ages?

The Baby Boomers get a lot of criticism for being Leftish and radical.

What I see as our legacy is an Australia becoming less and less committed to the common good, and more and more divided.

Tony Abbott and his crew of exclusionary school born-to-rule neo-conservatives are wilfully ignorant of the science of climate change.

They used the powerful daily lesson delivered by the super neo-con of all (Murdoch) and his power-elite pack to disingenuously confuse the public.

They say there is no evidence that smoking kills, no evidence that carbon strangles the earth, humidifies the atmosphere, or kills the oceans.

I remember a sign painted on the fence of the Balmain Power Station in the 1960s.

It said: "If you don't fight - you lose!"

Email, 10 Nov 2013

Vanlyn Davy, Pearl Beach